Parking
Residential
| On-street
| Schools
| Event | Stations
| Parking
and
enforcement plan
If you're going to cycle, you need a place to keep your machine at home, and somewhere leave your machine once you get to your destination. The storage facilities at both ends of the journey should be relatively secure and preferably not exposed to the rain. Cycle parking ranges from a handy stand outside the shop you're popping into, through the provision of mass parking facilities at big 'trip generators' like colleges, supermarkets, venues and workplaces, to the all-important ability to park your cycle securely where you live, whether it's inside your home, or in a secure facility close by. The parking situation in the borough of Hackney is like the proverbial curate's egg, ie good in parts. Thanks to lobbying by Hackney LCC's Mark Douglas and Patrick Field many years ago there is a planning requirement in the current (but now outdated) UDP (see PDF of page 262 of the 1995 UDP) to provide a certain level of cycle parking at new residential developments, although Hackney's planning department has not always succeeded in enforcing these guidelines in practice. Parking provision on the street is getting gradually better, though there are still lots of streets where it is very difficult indeed to find anything to lock a bike to. Various big trip generators were built with inadequate cycle parking in recent years, and sometimes with none at all, but the picture has been improving recently, an example being the new library and Learning Trust building in Mare Street, which was built with some cycle parking in a good prominent position at the entrance. Our volunteer activists work with the local authority, TfL, housing providers and other stakeholders to try to improve the supply and quality of cycle parking.
Residential cycle parkingSeveral years ago we ran a residential cycle parking project called HomeBikePark, which set out to test the demand for secure cycle parking on Hackney's housing estates, and to install and evaluate a variety of different solutions. Read more about the HomeBikePark project. Since then, secure cycle parking has been supplied on several estates, for example Frampton Park Estate. Before this renewed programme, the biggest rollout of on-street cycle parking was in 1998, when Groundwork Hackney initiated a scheme to install 200-plus stands around the borough. The distinctive asymmetric stands were designed specially for the project. While most of the stands were installed as planned, for some unknown reason several dozen were never installed and stayed in the council's stores. After a four-year gap, we re-started on-street parking provision in 2002 by initiating the Hackney On-Street Cycle Parking Project, which received £10,000 in Neighbourhood Renewal funding through the Hackney Strategic Partnership. Part of the funding paid for a study to identify locations of high demand. This work was done by a consultancy, Transportation Management Solutions (TMS). The main part of the funding then went on finally getting the remaining 40 of the Groundwork stands installed. During the aforementioned project, Dave Holladay of TMS came up with an innovative design
for on-carriageway cycle parking (95KB JPEG). There are long-standing examples of on-carriageway cycle parking dating from the
Groundwork-initiated parking installations in Woodlea Road N16: end-on
view and side-on view, and in the past couple of years the council has installed a couple of new on-carriageway parking facilities in high-demand locations in Shoreditch, with more to come. Schools cycle parkingIn previous years, cycle parking was provided at a few schools as part of Safe Routes To School projects run by Groundwork. Stations cycle parkingBritish Transport Police report that theft from motor vehicles at railway stations fell by a third in the UK during 2004/05 and was replaced as the most common offence by theft of or damage to pedal cycles at railway stations, which rose by a half. We're not sure what the exact picture is in Hackney, but it is likely to have followed the national trend. Few commuters will chance leaving their bike locked up at a station all day. Although many of Hackney's stations have some cycle parking provision, none of it is of the secure/enclosed long-term parking variety. In April 2006 a meeting is being set up between TfL, One Railway, Network Rail, LB Hackney and ourselves about potential sources of funding for secure parking.
We are pleased to say that many of our suggestions have been incorporated into the final PEP. We supported the roll-out of controlled/residents' parking zones over the past decade. However, car parking policy remains effectively separate from other areas of transport policy in the borough, and consequently little progress has been made in using car parking control as a policy for changing people's choice of transport mode. We would like to see a year on year reduction in the supply of available car parking in the borough. |
After several years during which no on-street cycle parking was installed, at a time when cycling was growing in Hackney faster than anywhere else in the UK, the council began to install cycle parking again in earnest in 2005. On the red routes (strategic road network) which Transport for London controls, there was a similarly long period of neglect, but since 2007 we have been working with TfL surveyors to pick new locations for cycle parking. Cycling continues to grow fast in our borough, and there is still a huge unmet demand for parking.
